Category: podcast

A talk with Thomas Carothers, an expert on foreign policy and democracy building. I ask him about the root psychological and social causes of extreme polarization, democracy breakdown, and authoritarianism. Carothers is an expert on international democracy support, democratization, and U.S. foreign policy. He serves as senior vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and is a leading authority on international support for democracy, human rights, governance, the rule of law, and civil society. He’s author or editor of ten critically acclaimed books and many articles, including, most recently, Democracies Divided: The Global Challenge of Political Polarization.

A transcript is below.

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A talk with Levi Boxell about his research into political polarization and the role social media plays in that. Boxell and colleagues did research showing that older Americans, who used the internet less than younger people, were more polarized and had more animosity towards the opposite political group than did younger people. While there could be less obvious, indirect processes at work, this seemed to show that the internet and social media were likely far from dominant factors in political polarization. Also, Boxell has done research comparing polarization change in different countries showing that because polarization isn’t happening consistently across many countries, the internet likely isn’t a primary factor.

We also discuss his research showing how there can be media bias in the choice of political leaders’ photos that news outlets choose, with negative bias leading to pictures with more negative emotion facial expressions and positive bias leading to choosing pictures with more positive emotion facial expressions.

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In this episode of the podcast, I interview Dr. Michael Macy of Cornell University, whose research on “opinion cascades” show how some political group stances on issues can be rather arbitrary and due to initial conditions (a good summary of the study). Similar to how in many complex systems, slightly different initial conditions can lead to vastly different results later on, the early conditions in a country, including early opinion-holders and influencers, can influence a political party to be aligned with one or another stance on an issue. These early choices have a cascading effect, meaning that, for some issues, the political parties could hold reversed positions if things had gone a bit differently.

Transcript is below.

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In this episode of the People Who Read People podcast, I interview Jaime Settle, a political scientist and professor at William and Mary. A transcript of this talk is below.

Settle is the author of Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America. In that book, she summarizes thinking on American political polarization and describes the research she’s done, which shows that Facebook likely increases “psychological” or perceived political polarization, in the form of Facebook users becoming increasingly antagonistic towards members of the opposite political party.

I talk to Dr. Settle about what the psychological pathways are behind how social media polarizes us, what the downsides of extreme political polarization are, and what we can all do to decrease the most dangerous forms of this polarization.

Links to this episode:

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Topics discussed include:

In this episode of the People Who Read People podcast, I interview Dr. Jennifer McCoy (her Twitter), a specialist in political polarization, democracy creation and destruction, and mediation. She has authored or edited six books and dozens of articles, and has acted as mediator in 2002 in Venezuala after a failed coup again Hugo Chavez. Her latest work is Polarizing Polities: A Global Threat to Democracy, co-edited with Murat Somer (2019).

I talk to Dr. McCoy about what she views as the psychological and emotional forces behind extreme political polarization, how the United States is similar or different from other countries that have unraveled due to extreme polarization, and what might be done to solve these issues.

Transcript of the interview is at bottom of this page.

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Topics discussed include:

In this episode of the People Who Read People podcast, I interview Dr. Omar Wasow (here’s his Twitter), an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University, and author of a paper entitled “Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion, and Voting.” In that research, he found that civil rights-related violent activity in the United States in the 60s shifted public opinion and voting more conservative/Republican. I ask Dr. Wasow about his research, his methods for finding correlations, public reactions to his work (which have included some negative reactions), and what lessons are in his work for modern-day activists. We also talk about the role of news and social media in political movements, and about Trump-related worst-case scenarios.

This interview was the second I’ve done on the subject of protests and riots; in the last episode, I interviewed a Portland antifa/BLM protester.

A transcript is below.

Links to this episode:

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Topics discussed include:

In this episode, I interview a self-described anti-fascist who has frequently taken part in the more militant and unlawful aspects of the BLM-focused protests and riots that have occurred in Portland, Oregon in the wake of George Floyd’s death. This person has also taken part in physical confrontations with alt-right pro-Trump groups, like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer. I ask them about the motivations and goals for these violent protests, why such behavior is justified, and the reasoning behind physically confronting rightwing groups.

A transcript is farther down on this page.

Links to the interview of the Portland antifa/BLM protester:

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I talk with Dave Karpf, (twitter: @davekarpf), a political scientist and associate Professor of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University.

There’s a good chance you’ve heard about how Cambridge Analytica used access to the Facebook data of millions of U.S. citizens and advanced digital advertising wizardry to essentially “hack” Americans’ minds and deliver a surprise presidential victory to Donald Trump. This depiction of Cambridge Analytica as nefarious data geniuses has been portrayed in many news stories, and probably most prominently in the popular documentary The Great Hack (Netflix link).

But what if this perception is largely untrue? What if Cambridge Analytica was exaggerating their behavior-influencing abilities, as many companies do? And what if our perceptions of CA as geniuses of digital influence is based on people accepting their exaggerated claims uncritically?

That is the stance of political scientist Dr. Dave Karpf, and in this episode he explains why. Links to this episode:

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On this episode, I talk with Dr. Rob Tarzwell, a psychiatrist and psych researcher. I talk to him about his 15 years as a psychiatric doctor in emergency room (ER) settings. We talk about some of the strategies and processes involved in trying to distinguish psych conditions from other types of conditions in the ER, and Tarzwell talks about some interesting cases that posed evaluation challenges. And we talk generally about the nature of mental illness and personality disorders. A transcript is below.

We also talk about a topic that I talked about in my recent interview with Dr. Timothy Jay: how there can be psychological or brain-disorder factors behind some instances of widely-shared/viral bad behavior, including racist behavior. We talk about a specific case involving a woman who was caught in three separate videos saying racist things to people of Asian descent, and what conditions might help explain her behavior. We also talk about a poker YouTube personality who had had some clear mental health struggles and who died earlier in 2020, and what could help explain his behavior.

Links to this episode:

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Other topics discussed include:

A talk with Dr. Timothy Jay, a psychologist and expert on the phenomenon of cursing. He has written several books, including Why We Curse, Cursing in America, and We Did What? (here is Dr. Jay’s Amazon author page). A transcript is below.

On social media, we often see videos of someone saying or doing rude, antisocial things, which can include threatening, misogynistic, or racist speech. Some of these people are suffering from conditions that can affect their judgment or ability to control their behavior, whether that be mental illness, Tourette’s Syndrome, or substance abuse. In this talk, we discuss some of the factors that can help explain some people’s offensive, aggressive, and taboo language.

For more on this subject: Farther down in this post, I’ve included a transcription from the podcast that talks more about this issue.

Links to this episode:

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Topics discussed include:

A talk with Dr. Neguine Rezaii, a psychiatrist and psychology researcher, about her team’s 2019 research using machine learning finding speech patterns in young adults that were predictive of later psychosis and schizophrenia diagnosis. The two language patterns found in the subjects’ speech were 1) a low semantic density (i.e., low meaning), and 2) speech related to sound or voices. Here’s a good article about this work: Machine learning approach predicts emergence of psychosis.

A transcript is below. 

Links to this episode:

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Topics discussed include:

A talk with Dr. Marcel Just, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, about his work using function magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look for brain activity related to specific thoughts. For example: differentiating the brain activity of someone thinking about an apple versus thinking about other words and concepts. Dr. Just and his work have been twice featured on the TV show 60 Minutes.

A transcript is below.

Links to this episode:

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Topics discussed include: